Day 16: Engaging readers in conversation, Interview on Calling All Authors, and a Research Tip from John Reese

In: Education| Marketing By: Brian Armstrong

3 Jul 2007

Engaging Readers In Discussion On BlogsThis is day 16 of my 30 day marketing challenge to get more readers on this website and make more money. This is a live demonstration of how to build a blog business!

Some of my contributing articles have started to appear, including part 2 of my rss-to-email review of FeedBlitz, my LifeHack.org article on why you need to be in Toastmasters (it’s a non profit group that teaches public speaking), and a similar (Toastmasters) article on MindPetals.com (an entrepreneurship site).

Notice that I sent different articles on LifeHack.org and MindPetals.com, even though they were on similar topics. The reason I did this was that both sites prefer unique content. Google rewards unique content. As an interesting side note, I’ve noticed that writing it once, and totally rewriting it again from scratch makes the second copy much better! Can you tell which one was written second? ;)

My three marketing tasks for today are…

1. Trying to engage the readers in more conversation. I’m starting to get quite a few comments on this site, and i spent this morning answering many of them. I also got a phone call from very nice woman who had a question, and we talked at length. I also got an interview request from Simonne over at AllTipsAndTricks.com (a top 100k site). Finally, i sent an offer to talk on the phone to Joel at JoelBadinas.com since we seem to be on a similar path. Connecting with more bloggers and providing a personal touch to the website as much as possible will really pay off I think.

2. I have an interview today at 4pm central on Calling All Authors – a radio show through the people at Nightingale Press. You can listen live online as I discuss my book and how easy it is to start a business. I’ll also post a recording of it in a few days in case you missed it. Note that this interview is a result of some work I did many months ago. A friend of mine who is an author recommended that website, and they were booked for four months, so I am just now appearing.

3. I watched John Reese’s latest video from Income.com. He demonstrates a technique in which you can use adwords to see how much traffic your competitors are getting (at least the ones that use adsense), and then partner with the best ones. Well, I did what John suggested and searched for sites related to starting a business.

Remarkably, the site with the most traffic was this little unassuming website called WAHM.com (stands for work at home moms). According to Google they get between 100-500 thousand page views per day!!! Thats more than Entrepreneur.com, which is the website of Entrepreneur Magazine (it’s very popular but is a pretty bad magazine by the way, subscribe to Business 2.0 instead).

Anyway, I made an attempt to contact the owner of WAHM.com (Cheryl) by offering to create a video or article for them on how to quickly set up a business website. Hopefully by offering value I can get in touch with them and get a partnership going.

The WAHM.com website is not professionally designed, and I never would have guessed they were getting so much traffic (they’re easily earning $1000/day in Adsense alone I imagine). Thanks John for the tip.

This post is part of a series on Website Marketing

Table of Contents:

  1. Building Website Traffic – Three Items Per Day For A Month
  2. Day 1: FeedBlitz, SEO, and Post Series
  3. Day 2: New Article, Amazon Cover Upload, and Digg Comments
  4. Day 3: LinkMachine, Google Website Optimizer, and ProBlogger
  5. Day 4: Interviews, SEOMoz, and Technorati
  6. Day 5: First Page of Google, Bugs, Article Marketing Lifehack.org
  7. Day 6: Email Signature, Blog Carnival, StumbleUpon
  8. Day 7: Link Structure, Pings, MyBlogLog
  9. Day 8: FeedFlares, Reciprocal Links, Broken Links
  10. Day 9: Page Cache, 301 Redirects, and Submitting to Blog Search Engines
  11. Day 10: Removed Bad Links, Earning $5639 Per Year, Tracking RSS Subscribers
  12. Day 11: Article for ProBlogger.net, StumbleUpon campaign, and Longer Domain Registration (attempt)
  13. Day 12: Extended Domain Registration, More Incoming Links, Article Submission
  14. Day 13: Successful and Outstanding Bloggers list, Backlinks Advice from Yaro Starak, and DMOZ
  15. Day 14: MindPetals Article, Slow Server, Google vs. Yahoo indexing
  16. Day 15: Submitted MindPetals Article, Conversation with Liz Strauss, and LifeHack.org Article
  17. Day 16: Engaging readers in conversation, Interview on Calling All Authors, and a Research Tip from John Reese
  18. Day 17: Posted Interview Audio, Faster Server, and New Business Cards
  19. Day 18: Article for LifeHack.org, Contacted About.com Contributer, Updated my LinkIn profile
  20. Day 19: Barnes & Noble, Froogle, and Shopping.com
  21. Day 20: Meta Keywords and Descriptions, New Article, 37Signals Blog
  22. Day 21: New Video On YouTube, Creating a Personal Balance Sheet, and Article Marketer
  23. Day 22: Purchased a Water Buffalo, Apple’s Marketing, and RSS Confusion
  24. Day 23: A New About Page, ProBlogger Article Finished, and More Comments
  25. Day 24: Keyword Research, more Links Exchanged, Article Distribution
  26. Day 25: Translated into 8 Languages, A Version For Mobile Devices, and Submitted To Dozens of Blog Directories
  27. Day 26: More RSS Directories, Alumni Networking, Alexa Screenshot Update
  28. Day 27: New Article on Audio Books, Removed Translation, and Networking Tips
  29. Day 28: Amazon, Amazon, Amazon!
  30. Day 29: Zero Million, Yahoo Answers, Wikipedia
  31. Day 30: Wrapping Up With A Few Final Links
  32. Conclusion

5 Responses

Leave A Comment

About this blog

Breaking Free is a blog for people who'd like to quit their 9-to-5, start their own business, and achieve financial freedom. It's written by web-entrepreneur Brian Armstrong. You can read more here »

  • Brian Armstrong: Hey Ash, I think I just started with $50 or something (which is 1,000 stumbles) to see the response, [...]
  • Ash: I'm trying StumbleUpon for ShirtJax. What daily budget did you use for BuyersVote? [...]
  • Adi: I believe this is a very misleading article, when one decides to make a change like stopping smoking [...]
  • Brian Armstrong: Thanks Mike! [...]
  • Brian Armstrong: Hi Mar, These I tended to read every word because they were good (although my regular reading rat [...]